Saturday, 8 September 2012

Outside (David McCooey)

Outside, by David McCooey. Salt. ISBN 9781844717590

This review by Philip Harvey first appeared in the Australian Book Review in 2012

Philip Larkin at 31 asked ‘Where can we live but days?’ It
shouldn’t take half a lifetime to learn that we have night and day, yet
learning how to live with this arrangement, and that this is the
arrangement, is something we keep adapting to all our lives. While not itself a
dichotomy, night and day helps form the dichotomous nature of our thinking, and
informs especially that method of describing and explaining everything, that we
call poetry. David McCooey has taken this elementary fact as first principle in
laying out writings that are by turns accepting and acerbic, buoyant and
bothered, carefree and careful. Or, to get nocturnal for a moment, they are not
absolutist, boring, or careless. The book itself is divided into two studied
sections, one coloured by day, the second by night.

W. H. Auden defined a poet as one who is ‘admired for his
earnest habit of calling / the sun the sun, his mind Puzzle’ and McCooey
certainly falls into this category. In different poems the sun, one of those
things for which we all owe our existence, is described as ‘The sun, bold
atheist, / making everything / seem as it is’, while in another it is ‘the
monotheistic sun / (that plants the crows’ feet near his eyes)’. If it really
is the case that there is nothing outside the text, then McCooey is our
contemporary in these descriptions, as well as someone we watch closely.
Plainly he has served his time deconstructing for the Department, which helps
explain the recurring device of inside and outside (the book’s title word),
which acts as geography, psychicdevice, abacus, consolation. Still, there is also nothing new under the
sun either, and McCooey has his Ecclesiastes side, as when he summarises in
‘Sleep’:

Sometimes

sleep is

a mansion;

sometimes

a hole

you pull

over yourself.

Peter Porter, in one of his ‘Mutant Proverbs’, states ‘By
their frights ye shall know them’ and McCooey takes up the Oulipian perverb with
similar relish, e.g. ‘Don’t put all your ego in one bastard.’ The line of wit
is tried with increasing confidence by McCooey, a direction that comes from
knowing what to say and when to stop. His grasp of English turns simple analogy
into a state of being, so that in ‘Exteriors’ we find

Attention of streets.

The condescension of morning air;

the heaviness of
afternoon.

While in ‘Hands’ he observes ‘they never question our
wishes’ and ‘when cold, they become incestuous.’ He takes a leaf from the
English Martian School while keeping to the page of Australian droll
pragmatism, with results that are nearly always gratifying to the reader. And
just as he succeeds in conveying the humours of our daily unusual usualness, so
he looks steadily at those ‘frights’ by which we know ourselves. ‘Memory &
Slaughter’ recounts first encounters with the violent death of animals, a
chicken killing machine when he was young, a roadkill fox on the freeway, a
whaling station at Albany, whose “vast smell / offered an unimaginable and
unrelenting intimacy / of disgust.” Interestingly when faced directly with
mortality the language becomes more formal and prosaic, working to regularise
the sense of shock. It is here we find McCooey capable of extending his tonal
range and choosing an appropriate diction.

Henry David Thoreau admitted he was “a parcel of vain
strivings tied.” A recurring theme in McCooey’s poetry is security and
stability. His is a world in need of safe signs and harbours, whatever the
circumstances. But never far away in this world is longing, and there is a
careful modulation between the self established in place and time and a self
too aware of desire, dream, temptation. The poetry signifies the longing. One
way of alleviating longing is to travel to exotic places and an entertaining
trip in this book is a diary through Peru, though this is not exactly the
Johnsonian “extensive view”.

In the suburbs

of Lima,

barbed wire.

In the better suburbs,

electrified

barbed wire.

It helps put Geelong in perspective. Another way of
alleviating longing is by going to the movies and one of the best sustained
sequences is a set of enchanting philosophical reflections on the films of
Stanley Kubrick. Notice the worrying worlds of meaning at work in the use of
that basic Anglo-Saxon word ‘hard’ in the opening ‘Strange Love’:

Politicians get hard

telling us that

a nuclear bomb is a

weapon of mass
destruction.

Or the unsettling prophetic relation of our world now, via
the space ship in ‘Notes on 2001’:

Inside, there is the sound

of technology.

Outside, there is the sound

of nothing.

Craig Sherborne, on the cover of this book, exclaims “I
would rather read his poetry than that of anyone else of his generation.” To
which one is given to ask, is this a wise way to talk? Are you serious? What
does this mean? There are any number of Australian poets alive today who are
within cooee of McCooey. Why do publishers put ejaculations like this on the
front of their books? Why do the authors let them? Certainly we should be reading
McCooey, but on his own terms, not just because of someone’s private Parnassus.
Reasons why it is worth going the distance with Outside are outlined
above, also McCooey’s ability to have fun with flux, his skills with different
modes of English poetic, and the time he takes to get right a spectrum of
experience, from our dreams of domesticity through to our terrors of
annihilation.